Garnik Der Hacopian | "Corners": +2 [ Fereshteh ]

+2 [Sam Center], Gallery 2, is pleased to announce "Corners", a solo exhibition by Garnik Der Hacopian, on view from August 21 through September 11, 2026.
"Corners" surveys a body of work by Garnik Der Hacopian from the 2000s, offering a renewed reading of his engagement with the still life, where the familiar vocabulary of the genre — vessels, textiles, flowers, and fruit
- is reassembled within new structures, recasting memory and image in the present. The exhibition reflects a longstanding concern in his practice: a continual return to cultural memory and visual heritage as part of lived experience and visual identity. Yet within the logic of his practice, this return never settles into repetition; each time, it takes on a different form through new experiences, perspectives, and materials.
The works in the exhibition are executed on wood and cement. Through carving, incising, and painting, Der Hacopian turns the cement surface into an active component of the image's structure; in these works, space is no longer simply a void or backdrop, but is materially shaped through the surface, enclosing the objects within it. Ridges, recesses, and the boundaries between planes divide the image into continuous yet distinct units, guiding the eye's movement from one section to the next. This approach to spatial construction can be read in relation to his more than three decades of professional architectural practice — a discipline concerned with geometry, proportion, and the organization of space.
Shared elements recur throughout the collection, yet within this pictorial system, emphasis shifts from the objects themselves to the dynamic network of relationships between them. In each work, the relationship among the elements and their interaction with the material structure of the work changes. "Corners" emerges from this interplay between continuity and transformation: a collection in which a familiar vocabulary reappears each time in a new order, offering the viewer another way of seeing.
Garnik Der Hacopian (b. 1944, Maragheh) is an Iranian-Armenian artist and architect who has been active in the Iranian modernist art movement since the 1960s. His work is held in collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, and has been presented at international events including Art Basel and Art Dubai. For more than six decades, Der Hacopian has worked across painting, architecture, and the visual arts.
His solo exhibitions include An Image of Duality at Aria Gallery (Tehran, 2019); an exhibition of works at Aria Gallery and Mah-e Mehr Gallery (Tehran, 2016); and two solo exhibitions at Seyhoun Gallery (Tehran, 1976 and
1975). Notable group exhibitions include Art Dubai with Aria Gallery (Dubai, 2017); Didar at Maryam Gallery (Tehran, 2016); Armenian Cultural Week at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (Tehran, 2009 and 2008); and The First International Art Fair of Tehran (Tehran, 1974).